by Linda Grant
“In the garden they’d covered the whole of the grass with a marquee and right in the middle of it was a long table full of food and in the center of that a whole roast pig with an apple in its mouth. Which now I come to think of it wasn’t so Arab, but even so, it was just a magical evening. There were these flowers which didn’t look much but had a sweet perfume to them and apparently they only give off a scent at night. I don’t know the name, your mother does for sure. But I still remember that party in the garden, and the smell of the flowers and the spice smell of dope, a swinging censer with joss sticks, and the smell of the pig which was being carved up, and thinking, How does it get better than this? But also believing wholeheartedly that it would get better because surely the rest of your life was going to be parties, more parties, that would surprise and delight you. London was a big place and all over it there must be these kinds of events happening and you would go on and on turning up at nine and ringing a bell and being invited into a magical world.
“I remember thinking, London is okay. It’s really okay if it’s like this, that others live this way, with this stylish ease. Style in a different way from how they mean it now. Inside, the house was full of books, endless shelves of haphazard volumes, you could have been blindfolded and pull one down and find something that interested you. The furniture was old and shabby, armchairs with torn chintz covers with flower patterns, and up one wall there was a line of empty cans from other countries with Arabic writing all over them and pictures of what they’d once had inside. Tomatoes, henna, okra. Well, we stayed up all night and ate bacon and eggs in the kitchen around six a.m. having had no sleep. There was dancing, and your mother and I bopped under the moon amid the scent of those night flowers and even then we can’t have been too tired because when we left, we took a wrong turn and we ended up on the edge of Hampstead Heath.
“To me it looked like open country, we’d got to the end of London altogether, but she said no, it was a kind of park. Let’s walk across it, she said, and so we did. We walked clear across the heath in the early-morning sun and we came to a hill which we climbed and there was London, spread out in front of us, wow! You could see everything, St. Paul’s Cathedral, the Post Office Tower, only the river you could not see but it was there. That’s why we went back the day of the big eclipse, decades later, and sat on the same spot where we had lain down the morning after that party. And looked up at the sun through the special glasses, then saw the lights of London come on automatically as the city thought it was dusk, at midday. But we saw it with our own eyes, it only happens twice a century.
“And on we went until we reached some high walls and this was Highgate Cemetery, where Karl Marx is buried. So I wanted to see that, for sure, even though I wasn’t a doctrinaire left-winger, he was still an important man, and we climbed up and over the walls, falling down among the weeds and the nettles, completely filthy and our fancy dress robes torn, and we wandered around forever through the graves, the dew still on the grass. The cemetery in the early-morning light was so eerie and beautiful, the ivy clinging to the walls. There was a little section with the graves of children and babies and your mother burst into tears when she saw a teddy-shaped gravestone, a little boy who only lived a few days.
“After a while we found this big bombastic statue of Marx, just his head on a kind of plinth. There was only one thing to do when you’re in front of the father of communism and no one else is around. We rolled a joint, of course, and then we fell asleep. The sun was rising higher and higher in the sky, it must have been around eight-thirty and shadows had started appearing. It was utterly peaceful. No one was about, just the two of us, and though we were in a burial ground, still it felt to me like we were two kids in the Garden of Eden, the first and only people alive, and we had no troubles, just hope and happiness. Your mother woke up and touched me, I touched her back. What can I say? That, we both believe, is how you were conceived, Marianne. On a sweet summer morning in the grass below Karl Marx’s monument.
“Quite a few people we know are buried just across from him in the journalists’ section and I have been to funerals there, especially during the AIDS time, when a lot of people our age died. And others were killed by their enemies, that’s where they buried Farzad Bazoft, the journalist who was murdered by Saddam Hussein. I’ve stood in a suit by the coffin of some poor dead soul and looked across the path to Karl Marx and remembered that morning so long ago in the seventies that now seems lost in a mist which came down from history, obscuring it. And even though I am mourning, I always remember that it was there we started something, you, Marianne.
“Eventually we found our way out and walked across another park and we were in Highgate Village, it was Saturday, and we fell asleep on the top deck, the front seat, woke up in the West End and had to double back, home to Islington.
“So these are my memories of the seventies, just things we did together. And the people are long lost. You walk along the street or you’re on the tube coming home from work and someone your own age or older, some tired-looking person, is sitting there reading a novel or a newspaper or just staring into space, and you think, Did I know you once? Were we at the same parties? Did I sit on the floor eating a bowl of brown rice with veggies in our squat and you were there, rolling a joint on an album cover? Did you turn out just like us? Middle-aged people whose kids are older now than we were then?
“I keep thinking of all the people I’ve known in London, all these years of living here, they pass through your life and you have got old and they must have got old, but if you saw them you’d cry, because you’d understand for the first time how old you are, and that it’s all long gone and we didn’t treasure it. We thought there was no way it would not last forever, together with our hair. Isn’t it weird that hair of all things turns out to be so important? I look in the mirror and I do not know myself. So I look away. This wasn’t supposed to happen. I’m the kid from California who was born in sunshine and I’ve spent almost all my life in one cloudy day after another.”
The Gift
For twelve hours they have been driving across Missouri and Kansas and Andrea is beginning to hallucinate whole towns, with traffic jams and zebra crossings and Gothic church spires and the melodic trill of ice-cream vans. She is suspended in enduring flatness. The van doesn’t seem to be moving, making no progress at all across the unfolded map she holds on her knee, while Stephen is clenched over the wheel behind his sunglasses, locked into a robotic mode of driving. She wonders if his body has been sucked out by aliens and replaced by a husk, capable of doing one thing only: hanging on to the steering wheel, keeping his foot on the gas pedal and occasionally overtaking a slower vehicle.
Earlier on in the journey there had been baffling signs: Ped Xing! Deer Xing! but that was days ago. There have been no peds or deer since—she thinks the signs were as long ago as Indiana. Square white churches, red barns, silos, strange buildings whose agricultural purpose she can’t work out. Tiny towns marked with water towers—they look like a few LEGO bricks thrown down on an empty table. Other places are just a marker, uninhabited, devoured by the vast prairie. The sky is immense and filled with milky galaxies, the moon appears as a spherical orb, not a flat disc, its back in shadow. Andrea feels that she and her family are dots, pinpricks, their planet too insignificant to be observed from the stars with the naked eye. No wonder Americans think big, are big (horrifyingly obese), if they need to assert themselves in this vast empty landscape.
The children sleeping in the back, Stephen catatonic at the wheel, make her feel she is the only sentient being in the cosmos. Only her own mind thinks and imagines. They pass other vehicles, cars, trucks, vans, but the occupants are remote, aloof, solitary. Everyone drives alone, she realizes; even when there is someone beside you in the passenger seat, the road itself is your all-absorbing companion. She cannot drive, is unable to help out her husband. Partly this is because of her eyesight. She has astigmatism and has always been too vain to wear spectacles, but she has
finally given in at Stephen’s insistence and now has a pair of gold-rimmed glasses. But even corrected, the deformed lenses in her eyes make the exterior world a little flat, she cannot make good judgments about spaces and finds it difficult to change lanes. She has failed her test four times.
She remains someone who is mostly comfortable on foot but America is totally different from home. The car is your own clothing. You cannot go about naked. All the family meals are eaten at truck stops, where she feels herself to be a tiny, diminished figure standing, waiting for Stephen to zip up as he closes the door of the rest room, handing the key back, her sheltering in the shadow of the giant wheel of a Mack truck with a scarlet nose jutting out and a far-flung community on the CB radio in which female hitchhikers are beaver and accredited female hitchhikers who can’t be messed around with are angel beaver.
The truck stops have the same menus whichever state you are in, she always has a chef’s salad and Stephen always has a burger with fries and the children eat off their parents’ plates, according to what they fancy, because it is too exhausting to interrogate the many choices available.
But Stephen reassures her that soon they will reach the mountains, the landscape will change, he promises. She will see the Rockies, which are almost as good as the Himalayas.
The kids are suspiciously well-behaved, sleeping a great deal as if drugged. Stephen has not told Andrea that he is indeed drugging them, slipping small amounts of sedative, crushed up, into their food. It would have been impossible to do America the way he wanted, flying to New York and then driving in a rented van from coast to coast, without their compliance, even involuntary. Max is a happy child, he can take anything and is easy to cajole or distract with a story. Marianne is the difficult one, cranky and demanding. She has passed through the terrible twos repetitively asking why of everything she comes in contact with. Why are there corners? He does not have an answer, him the Rhodes Scholar.
The back of the van has been laid out with wall-to-wall mattresses that the kids can bounce around on and if they stand on boxes they can see out of the window, except, as Andrea points out, there’s nothing to see, everything is the same same same.
“Look! The mountains,” Stephen cries when they finally reach the Rockies. And the children stare, unable to understand what it is they’re supposed to be looking at. They feel vague and placid; Marianne holds her brother’s hand and sucks his other thumb, which she is not allowed to do to her own thumb. Max sees his sister as a strange swirl of color. His thumb sends waves of pleasure up his arm and down into his body, and he gets a little erection. This is all he will remember from the great trip across America. He is only two and still working on the interesting mechanical difficulties of fastening shoes, which come with more than one option, such as the lace and the buckle.
The whole family finds Utah curious. The Great Salt Lake looks to Marianne like snow, which she has seen over the course of a couple of London days, and Max closes his eyes against its dazzling whiteness. It reminds the adults of the moon. Then they cross the penultimate state line into Nevada, spend a night in Reno, drive on, and finally Stephen is home.
The border is Lake Tahoe. Beyond that, the promised land, the land of milk and honey which God, he believes, must have made a covenant to grant to people like his father, the travelers who go on moving until they run out of land to cross and find themselves on the rim of the world, the mountains finally behind them. The beach is where a person can be happy and the sea our original home. This is always the destination, the sand, the scrubby grasses that grow in it, the birds gliding in the thermals.
All the money they have saved by sleeping in the van is to be splashed out on a hotel in San Francisco. Now here, Andrea thinks, she could live. She loves all the ups and the downs and in particular the afternoon fogs coming in from the sea, the place is atmospheric. Stephen shows her the neighborhood of Victorians which survived the 1906 earthquake, everything is so charming and everyone seems so middle-class, which is not what they are at all because, he explains to her, middle-class means something different and there is no word in the language for what the people are who live in these Carpenter Gothic houses.
On the other side of the bay they find Sausalito, where blond couples are roller-blading about the streets and she cannot help but notice how incredibly healthy everyone looks, all lightly tanned without being bronzed, and sitting out-of-doors in cafés eating large sandwiches with what looks like bushy clumps of thin grass poking out of the sides. She can see her children growing up here lean and fit, with American accents. Her chief anxiety is how she would resume her work, because her consent to this exploratory trip, this monthlong visit to the U.S. to size up the opportunities for Stephen’s career, had been based on his reassurance that she could not find a better place in the world to pursue her new profession than America.
There had been days when Stephen was walking toward the tube, navigating the windy roundabout at Highbury Corner on a tepid summer morning of intermittent weak showers, when he was engulfed with crushing nostalgia. For the parents he had not seen in nine years, for the balmy Los Angeles weather with its lack of extremes, for the ocean which he’d taken for granted, for the suburban home lounging on its lot with the palm tree growing out front and his bedroom with its childhood chemistry set and college textbooks, his mom in the kitchen baking chocolate cake and his father pulling up in his automobile after work, the smell of the pelts on his skin, going straight into the bathroom to wash, and The Ed Sullivan Show and the passionate rows that sometimes broke out between husband and wife in which each would revert to their native language in their helplessness to fully express themselves, and his big sisters who smelt of woman. The two girls, as he still thought of them, both taking after their mother with Latina looks, high-breasted, slender ankles, the shadow of a double chin, taking hours in the bathroom, reading movie magazines, ignoring their little brother, the pest… he often felt he could not tell them apart, they morphed into each other. But one had a mole on the side of her chin, from which she plucked dark hairs with tweezers despite their mother saying she had read in Reader’s Digest you could get cancer that way.
And then, with the memory of his sisters Carole and Rita overwhelming him with nostalgia, reminding him to write more often on blue airmail paper, he would open his eyes and here he was, in London, under those interminable brown skies.
He was doing okay in London. He had a good job as a staff reporter on New Scientist, he had a family. But Stephen Newman was not born under blue skies only to do “okay.”
“I want to go home,” he said one night, when they lay in bed and the children were rocking their way to dreamland. It was 1978. President Carter had declared an amnesty, the draft dodgers were free to return to America without retribution.
“This is home,” she said.
“This? It’s just a rented flat.”
“But what difference does that make? Look, all our things are here, our pictures, the children’s toys.”
They had the whole floor of the house now. Every time someone moved out, they went to Ralph and asked him for the room.
Stephen said, “We’ll get new things, kiddo, better things, much better, you’ll see.”
“But I don’t understand what we’re going to do in America. I can’t envisage our life there.”
“Look, I can find a job no problem, probably back in the research field, a university job, I bet. As for you, whatever you want! Whatever you’re doing here. Whatever makes you happy. That’s the whole point of the country, it’s where people come to make a fresh start. We’ll all be American, our kids will be American.”
“I don’t want to be American, that’s your shtick, not mine.”
He always smiled when she used such words, which came out of her mouth daintily in what was to his ears her cut-glass accent, as if the shtick was presented on a doily resting on a porcelain cake stand.
“Hold my shtick,” he said, cupping her breasts. “We’ll talk about th
is tomorrow.”
Their sex life together was still very good. He was clumsy but when that happened, she thought of something else.
“But what exactly do you have here?” he began again, the next evening, when he got home from work. “Your parents who write to you once in a blue moon? Crazy Grace? Our friends? We’ll make new friends. We can do anything we want, but I never, ever said I would stay here. We got married because you were prepared to do me a favor and save me from the draft, and we made a real marriage out of it. Thank you. But I really do have to go home.
“And the other thing,” he said. He had reached his clinching argument. “You’ve spent all this time training to be a psychotherapist and if there’s one country in the world where they’re crying out to hand over half their paychecks to shrinks, it’s America. The Jews are neurotic.”
There was a theory that psychoanalysis was a Jewish science; many of her tutors and mentors at the clinic in Hampstead where she went to lectures were Jewish. She had had to submit to being analyzed herself for several years, the crows had been thoroughly excavated, and the hanging rabbit and her parents’ abandonment.
Her years of therapy, paid for by part-time receptionist work in hotels, had allowed her to make her peace with her parents. She had taken the train to Keswick and spoken to them about how they had failed her. The confrontation resulted in no recognition on their part, they acknowledged nothing, she had never thought they would. Hope was not the same as reason. But she felt the weight of a coal truck lifted from her back as she walked away from the small, stifling house.
Her mother had dusted ornaments the whole time she was talking and looked round occasionally to correct some small detail in her daughter’s account of each incident. Her father was drunk.
They had turned themselves into walls and doors. The doors had been carefully locked. She knew she had to proceed on her own from now on, the hotel and all its horrors were metaphors more than memories. There was no alternative.
